My mom gave me a copy of Spider Robinson’s The Callahan Chronicals for Christmas, and I’m just getting around to reading it. Seems cute. In one of the forwards, though, Mr. Robinson writes of a tantalizing anecdote that’s apparently pretty well-known in SFdom:
There being no con nearby, I turn to the Dopers. Who’s he talking about? Obviously male and obviously dead prior to February 1976, when the Forward was written. Was this an author who was successful before this little stunt, or did he become successful as a result of being an intentionally bad author? Or is the whole thing just some apocryphal SF holy grail of a story?
We beat this to death here on an earlier thread, but I can’t seem to find it even with a general search on Robinson’s name.
The consensus was that no good candidate for that description exists. Either the number of sequels is wrong or the timing is wrong or something else fails. My personal opinion is that it’s an urban legend.
It certainly can’t be The Man Who Folded Himself, which is a fine book from a fine writer.
I actually asked this at several conventions, and the most consistent answer I got was E. E. “Doc” Smith, the Tarzan series. I have no idea if this is true, though, and sadly, I missed a chance to ask Spider himself.
It seems like bs to me. L Ron didn’t publish that lengthy unreadable series till after starting scientology. Doc Smith and Burroughs may not have been great literature but they were by no means terrible. I found the martian chronicles pretty entertaining myself. The closest thing I can think of is the old “Perry Rhodan” series, which were brought out by a consortium. They were terrible, but I don’t think they were the result of a bet.
I’m not ruling it out, but it should be more well known if true.
Actually, the first 6 Gor novels aren’t that bad. After Norman gets seriously into B&D, they slide quickly into the pit. But **Tarnsman, Assassin, Nomads ** and Raiders are all pretty standard stuff. Hardly BAD.
Two actual cases where the author wrote badly on purpose:
Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream. Basically, this is a parallel world novel, set in a universe where Adolph Hitler left Germany to become an SF artist/writer in the US. When you get past the title page of the book, you discover its actual title is “Lords of the Swastika,” a science fiction novel by Adolph Hitler. To go further, though, Norman assumed that since Hitler’s first language wasn’t English, his novel would be poorly written, so its filled with purple prose and awkward phrasing.
Burroughs and Smith started writing before the term science fiction had been invented. Can’t be them.
The Berserker stories were bought by Fred Pohl for If long before they were published in book form. So that’s not it.
The Perry Rhodan stories come from a magazine which started in about 1961 I think. I bought a copy in Austria in 1980. Are they still being published. There are a lot more than two dozen of them!
The Gor books are a better candidate, but judging from his Daw book “Imaginative Sex” (oh, the woes of being a collector ) I think the professor who writes under the name of John Norman actually likes that stuff.
My vote is for the Prescott of Antares series by “Alan Burt Akers” which is a pseudonym of Ken Bulmer. Bulmer is a skilled enough writer to pull it off, and Don Wollheim needed enough product to buy the stuff. There are also about two dozen of them. They are flippant enough to be written by someone as a joke (one of the earlier ones insults Gor). They are clearly a takeoff on the Barsoom books. I found them junky but reasonably fun - much, much better than even the early Gor books, for instance.
The only problem is that Bulmer is still alive. And the last Prescott book came out in 1988.
(Here is a great site for researching this stuff I just found, by the way.)
DAW also came out with a really crappy series in its early days, but I don’t think it lasted that many volumes.
Edmond Hamilton wrote a bunch of Captain Future crap, and died in 1977. Not that many ever got published, but it had its own magazine - but I don’t think Hamilton created the character.
I know of lots of really bad series, but not so many that went 24 volumes.
I’m surprised Chuck didn’t pounce on this, but this thread is accreting so fast he may not have noticed.
Yes, the authors deliberately wrote an unpublishably bad novel. It was accepted, not published, by PublishAmerica. PublishAmerica claims to be a traditional publisher but is not. (It’s a vanity press.) Nobody outside of its most fanatic supporters think that anything it publishes is “high quality” except by sheerest accident. The book did see print, but was essentially self-published to keep the gag going.
And I do have to remind people that your wild guesses are trashing the reputation of perfectly sincere writers, none of whom meet the criteria that Robinson gives out.
Remember, as of 1976 the writer had to be dead and author of a book with two dozen sequels. Not one of the names tarnished here fits.
Tarnished? Assuming that this writer published under a pseudonym, which I’d expect, no one is being tarnished. Writing bad stuff on purpose is not the same thing as being a bad writer. What is being tarnished here is the taste of the reading public - but considering the amount of shelf space devoted to Star Trek and Star Wars novels, we don’t need more evidence of that, do we?
Of course Robinson might have been pulling our legs. That was about the time he had his book review column in Galaxy, wasn’t it?
Yeah, I missed the post. I did point it out in my own post, though.
But, of course, this had nothing to do with the OP. Atlanta Nights was deliberately designed to be unpublishable (though in the early going of the project, we did get an offer from a legitimate small press editor to publish it based on the concept alone). It’s also a one-shot – no one plans to do it again.
It is available for free download from the links in my sig.
Kurt Vonnegut had a fictitious character in many of his novels called Kilgore Trout. Trout was a 4th rate SF author who could only get his work published in “open-beaver” girly magazines.
Vonnegut reportedly based Trout on Theodore Sturgeon (get it?).
After several years of this silliness, Philip Jose Farmer decided to ghost-write and get published Trout’s great opus “Venus on the Half-Shell”. I actually had a copy of this once, it was amusingly atrocious.
) I think the professor who writes under the name of John Norman actually likes that stuff.